Methods Café 2020

Chairs

Sarah Wiebe, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, swiebe@hawaii.edu

Biko Koenig, Franklin & Marshall College, bkoenig@fandm.edu

 

The 2020 APSA theme, “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization,” invites scholars to investigate questions related to the threats and stresses experienced by democracies worldwide, the importance of diversity as a strength of democratic performance, the limits of achieving equity and inclusivity in heterogeneous publics throughout the globe, and their implications for the resilience of democratic institutions. Since political scientists’ research methods are crucial to this exploration, the virtual Methods Café brings together a group of scholars experienced in a variety of interpretive research methods, ranging from interviews to participant observation. At the café, these scholars are available to anyone who wishes to discuss the area of study or method they specialize in.

The café is not a panel or roundtable session where presenters prepare formal presentations on their topics and speak in sequence. Instead, it is an informal, virtual setting—“a café” with multiple spaces to meet and chat—that allows for one-on-one and group discussions, networking and support. Here, cafe “visitors” will find online break-out rooms within the virtual café space. Each break-out room is dedicated to a methodological topic (e.g., “Interviewing”), and run by “specialists” in that research method. The café will also include spaces with book publishers, journal editors, and representatives from funding agencies who are familiar with these methods. Topics and the names of the specialists are listed below and in the conference program. The Methods Café chairs will be available during the event to help visitors find and join the different discussions.

“Visitors” to the café are invited to arrive at any point in the time block allotted, visit any break-out room they like, and stay as long as they like. A visitor might join a room and ask the specialist to talk about how s/he uses the method on offer in that room. If a conversation is already under way, others can join in or just sit and listen. One need not worry about having questions that are “too elementary”—it is fine to ask anything about that method, at any level!—and visitors may leave a room at any time. Altogether, we encourage visitors to circulate among as many rooms and conversations as they wish, and we ask only they sign in at each table they visit—our way of evaluating the demand for each topic. This year we are excited to add new tables such as Indigenous Interpretive Methods and Intersectional approaches to gender and sexuality.

Visitors at past cafés have ranged from doctoral students to full professors. The range of questions is equally broad and might include:

  • “What is x method?” or
  • “I’m in the midst of analyzing my data and I’ve run into [describes a specific problem], how should I handle it?” or
  • “One of my committee members doesn’t believe that interpretive methods are valid. How can I respond to this challenge?”

First initiated by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea in 2005, the Methods Cafe has been a successful and well-attended part of APSA for 14 years.

 

How To Join

Please log into the virtual meeting platform at https://apsa.conferencecontent.net/. The sign in info will be your username and password for the regular APSA website, so they don’t need to make a new one.

Once inside the platform, select the “Program” tab from the top. From there you can search for “Methods Cafe” in the search bar, or browse by day, time, etc. Once you find the cafe listing, press the “launch zoom” button to join. The “room” will open 30 minutes before the event.

Please reach out to the Café co-chairs if you have any questions.

 

List of Experts

Archival Research and Historical Analysis

Diana Kim (Georgetown)

When, why and how do political scientists engage in archival research? Amid disruptions wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, what are concrete strategies for utilizing digitized sources and remote access to repositories, domestic and foreign? And what analytical and normative promises (and pitfalls) accompany such endeavors? This virtual methods café invites and explores such questions.

 

Ethics, Emotions and the IRB

Sarah Parkinson (Johns Hopkins)
Sarah E. Parkinson is the Aronson Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Grounded by social network theory and ethnographic methodologies, her research examines organizational behavior and social change in war- and disaster-affected settings, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

 

Political Ethnography and Case Studies

 Tani Sebro (Humboldt State)

Michelle Weitzel (New School)

This table offers a space to reflect on practical and theoretical issues surrounding ethnographic research in political science. Topics for discussion include fieldwork and immersion, the IRB process, ethnographic methods such as participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, and sensory ethnography, strategies for conducting ethnographic research among vulnerable populations and in authoritarian contexts, positionality and reflexivity in ethnographic writing and analysis, what it means to have an “ethnographic sensibility,” and the place of ethnographic methods in the discipline at large. The table organizers have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the MENA region, and have written on topics such as the politics of sound, aesthetic nationalism, and necropolitics.

 

Funding

Daniella Sarnoff (SSRC)

Robert Kirsch (Arizona State University)

I’ll discuss the following areas of seeking sponsored research: some nuts and bolts aspects of finding solicitations, communicating with program officers, what to expect from your sponsored research office, among others. As well, I’ll discuss finding opportunities for social scientists and doing mixed-methods/qualitative analysis with STEM colleagues and building networks to further sponsored opportunities.

 

Interviewing

Sam Majic (John Jay College of Criminal Justice)
Come to this table with all of your questions about interviewing—  recruitment techniques, questions to ask, analysis… anything! 

Frederic Schaffer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Frederic Schaffer is a specialist in ethnographic interviewing with particular expertise in one type of ethnographic interviewing: ordinary language interviewing. Ordinary language interviewing is a tool for uncovering the meaning of words in everyday talk. By studying the meaning of words, the promise is to gain insight into the various social realities these words name, evoke, or realize.

 

Publishing in the Academy and Beyond

Kim Yi Dionne (UC Riverside)

Sarah Surak (Salisbury)

Jocelyn Boryczka (Fairfield)

Dara Strolovitch (Princeton)

New Political Science co-editors Jocelyn Boryczka and Sarah Surak will discuss the intersection of activism and academic publishing, specifically how academic journal publishing can be a form of activism necessary to advancing progressive change in a time when knowledge production is under siege.

 

Teaching Qualitative Methods Inside and Outside the Classroom

Elisabeth Wood (Yale)

Cecelia Lynch (UC Irvine)

How should we teach qualitative methods? In this session I will share information about my approach, which builds on the course taught by Michael Burawoy in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. The approach centers on learning through practice: each participant carries out a project from ethics review to writing up the results. Class sessions combine discussions of great ethnographic works, methods texts, and student dilemmas. I look forward to brainstorming with participants about how they teach qualitative methods.

 

Intersectionality and Community Engagement

Leah Levac (Guelph)

Leah will speak about her research that combines theoretical and methodological commitments from critical community engaged scholarship, Indigenous methodologies, and intersectionality to develop and participate in research collaborations with the broad aim of advancing more participatory and deliberative forms of policy development and decision-making. Her existing research collaborations are varied. They include an ongoing multi-year collaboration with women and women-serving organizations in three resource-affected communities/Nations in the north of present-day Canada, and a recently-formed collaboration with anti-poverty and housing service organizations in rural and small urban communities to explore the experiences of people living with poverty with COVID and related policy decisions. These and other collaborations with which she is involved emphasize shared decision-making across all dimensions of the research, attention to power, social change outcomes, and the use of multiple methods including sharing circles and focus groups, interviews, arts-based approaches and workshops, and scoping reviews

 

Indigenous Interpretive Methods

Uahikea Maile (University of Toronto)

Writing about Indigenous land defense while in the trenches of it is an onerous research endeavor. Writing the land back is a method of political analysis in and for Indigenous movements for life, land, and sovereignty. It is grounded interpretation, analysis, and writing about the work of getting land back to get land back.

Rachel George (University of Alberta)

For the session on Indigenous Interpretive Methods I will be chatting about the Seascapes Project which explores coastal Indigenous relationships with water and how these relationships are impacted by the onslaught of extractive industry projects along the coast. Specifically, I will focus on community-engaged research through our participation in Tribal Journeys which is an annual canoe journey drawing together Indigenous nations across the west coast.

 

Public Engagement and Action

Adam Levine (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)

We’ll talk about how and why researchers may want to form collaborations with organizations such as nonprofits, governments, for-profit businesses, and so on. We’ll also talk about the various forms these collaborations can take, both informal and formal. Looking forward to answering questions, sharing experiences, and learning from each other!

 

Methods Café Assistant

Philip Luke Johnson, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

 

 

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